Speaking on Channel 4 News in the UK, Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales — who serves as an internet advisor to the British government — revealed that the open web-based encyclopedia website would feature the same levels of encryption used for transferring financial data.

This means that once visitors to Wikipedia sign in, their activity on the site cannot be monitored by outside sources. Wales says that the move is a response to recent reports surrounding the NSA and its internet snooping activities and follows a similar move by Facebook.

“We think it’s pretty good protection. Obviously there are always questions about whether or not the NSA has managed to secretly decrypt everything. We think that’s highly unlikely. But you know, you have to do encryption right. It’s non-trivial to do it well. But we trust our bank data and so forth to the same type of encryption,” he said.

On Thursday, Facebook, which, like Wikipedia, is one of the world’s top 10 most popular web destinations, announced that it is rolling out default HTTPS web browsing in a bid to guarantee user security. The secure connection will mean that data received from Facebook and that sent by a Facebook user when signed in will be encrypted.

Unlike Facebook, Wikipedia users currently don’t require an account or password to browse the site or retrieve articles, but membership is compulsory for editors and contributors.

And as a secure login is necessary in order to encrypt data, the announcement means that soon, Wikipedia’s millions of users will be able to rest assured that their privacy is protected, but will no doubt be stressing about the need to create and remember yet another robust, unique password.

However, Wales sees this increased focus on personal internet security as a growing, global trend.

“I think we are definitely in an era where we need to think a lot more about security in lots of different ways. One of the ways is the threat of governments snooping on innocent people. Other threats could be security relating to people hacking into websites or into your Facebook account or things like that. I think it’s something that the entire industry and government needs to think really hard about,” he said.

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